2.23.2005

Choice Point 1 2 3 4 5 6

You probably already know the backstory to this post, but there's this big company called ChoicePoint which keeps big databases of... well, probably everything you've ever purchased. They deal with credit companies and things, that's what they do. They're in the news of late because they accidentally sold tons of private information on 145,000 people to criminals. "Oops, our bad."

So today I'm at a car dealership getting some work done on one of our company cars. I'm sitting in the customer lounge watching CNN Headline News. First of all I'd like to say that CNN totally sucks. It sucks a donkey with ass herpes. I was there for thirty minutes and every five minutes they had a commercial break. Every five minutes! And within those thirty minutes, actually about 10 minutes of actual news time if you subtract the commercials, I saw all the news stories twice. Twice!

So they suck.

Anyway, they were doing a story on Choice Point. They were making a big deal about how the people who "stole" all this personal information from Choice Point weren't hackers or burglars, they were committing fraud while doing what appeared to be legitimate business. To enforce that point, CNN showed how tight security was around the Choice Point building. During this point in the story they showed an employee entering through the security gates in the lobby. I think it was the president or whoever they were interviewing, but I couldn't really say for sure.

So this guy walks up to a keypad and, while they are filming, types in his access code. Right there in front of the camera, just types it in! This is the epitome of poor security, but what's worse is that I saw with my very own eyes that his access code was 1-2-3-4-5-6!!

In their defense, this was surely just a staged example of their security mechanism and he wasn't really doing anything. I hope that's what was going on but that's certainly not what it looked like because as soon and he punched in the numbers and put his palm on a screen to do one of those insecure, easily defeated handprint reading things, the doors buzzed open and he waltzed right through.